


Big Feminist Directedverse Fic

by Skull4601 (shiplizard)



Series: Big Queer Directedverse [2]
Category: Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: AU, BDSM, Directedverse, F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-12
Updated: 2011-09-12
Packaged: 2017-10-23 16:45:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/Skull4601
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the Directedverse, where the lines of gender are drawn between Dom and Sub, Harry Dresden (sub) is tapped to join the wardens. It's a lousy place to sort out his sexuality and the lingering questions he has about his feelings for John Marcone-- moreso when he gets caught in the crossfire between Donald Morgan (old collar-burning school of sub-rights) and Carlos Ramirez (who thinks that the personal is political and Morgan needs to grow up and join the second wave).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Big Feminist Directedverse Fic

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Take Clothes Off As Directed](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/4480) by Helenish. 



> Helenish's Take Clothes Off as Directed is a well written AU that explores gender presentation and gender roles in a universe where the divide between genders is re-imagined. It's become a genre of its own.
> 
> Big!Gay!Directedverse is a not-very-well written AU that hamfistedly stumbles around GLBTQ issues in the same universe, with all apologies to Helenish. It contains hypothetical Directed!verse analogs to sexism and homophobia.
> 
> This installment contains a failed attempted sexual assault and discussion, but not portrayal of government sponsored rape.

I said a lot happened between the day I apologized to John Marcone and the day I invited him to bed; I wasn’t kidding. A lot happened after that, too, things I don’t want to relive. But as far as sorting out how I felt went--

I got tapped to join the Wardens.

Not the way I’d recommend you try to sort out your identity crises and questions of sexuality. It helped, I mean, but. Jeeze.

Captain Luccio-- a tall woman, her belt worn almost the same shade of silver as her hair-- pushed a bundle of cloth and leather across the table. She was handsome, regal; compelling, wore her strength like a comfortable sweater; I’d probably have been instantly in love if it weren’t for the whole ‘you belong to the assholes who want to see me dead’ thing. “You accept, then?”

“You didn’t give me much of a choice,” I said bitterly. My experiences with the White Council had been unpleasant. At best. But I’d had a hand in the conflict starting up-- a lover of mine had been in trouble. I’d been trouble back. The Red Court wanted me delivered on a leash, and if I didn’t take the Warden job, I’d be tempting fate. “Sure, I’ll sign up. Your funeral.”

“You sound so enthusiastic,” she said dryly.

“Well, golly. The MILITARY. I’m so excited to be with all those big hard tops,” I said sarcastically; she snorted through her nose, and I didn’t know why. Not at the time. I unfolded the cloak, and picked up the band of leather with a scowl.

It unfolded in my hand.

A belt. Sturdy silver leather.

“What’s this?” I held it up, shaking it at her before I shoved it across the table. “Did you miss a memo?”

Luccio shook her head, her fine features going serious. “I know that you have been mishandled by Wardens before. They were not mine.”

“You can’t ‘mishandle’ a soulgaze.”

“I’m not referring to that.” She pushed the belt back across the wooden surface. “You were made to feel unequal because of your inclinations. Some think so, perhaps. Not I. Those that serve in bed are more often the ones that can bear greater pain; they can think rationally when confronted by a greater force.”

“And we follow orders real good.”

She half smiled. “Do you, Dresden? I find myself doubting it. Still. The belt is your right; serve in bed all you like, but when you stand as the council’s sword, matters of love are irrelevant.”

I blinked at her. I guess I wasn’t expecting the wardens to be one of those creepy old ‘every servant of Athena becomes a top’ arrangements you zoom uncomfortably past when you’re learning the history of sexual magic.

“Oh.”

“You need not wear it. But you already know that some listen more easily when they see it.” She left it on the table, along with a piece of paper. “Come to this location in two weeks; we have no time to delay your training.”

That was surprise number one.

Surprise number two came when I got to the main North American headquarters, surrounded by other Wardens, other trainees; I felt stupid and out of place, even with the belt. I was surrounded by a lot of other belts, wearing theirs a lot more comfortably, and every minute I shuffled through the crowd I expected to be called out for daring. Some of these assholes knew.

“Hey,” someone greeted me. “Hey! Dresden, right!” A young warden was cutting through the crowd.

I don’t feel great about this, but my first impression was ‘that belt’s not fooling anyone, sweetheart, you’re going to get beaten’. And my second thought was: holy shit, Luccio wasn’t putting me on. I’m not the only one.

The young sub was beautiful; tanned, trim, his hair dark and curling around his pretty face. He had his ears pierced in three neat symmetrical rows, little pearl studs peeking out-- when he stuck out a hand I couldn’t fail to notice the leather cuff snapped around his wrist. “You are Harry Dresden, right, I’m not confusing you with someone else? You’re too tall to be somebody else. I’ve seen you at council meetings. Carlos Ramirez, West Coast regional command.”

Regional. Command. COMMAND. Hell’s BELLS.

“Harry Dresden,” I said dumbly. “But you knew that.”

His face split into a gleaming smile-- models in magazines don’t have such perfect teeth-- and he slapped me on the shoulder. “This will be great-- a new face around. The sub barracks have been pretty empty. It’s just been me and Morgan and a few Canadians.”

HELL'S. CLANGING. BELLS.

“Morgan.”

Morgan. My parole officer. Morgan, a man with more scars and crags than Everest.

...Morgan with his immaculately maintained braid and perfectly trimmed beard.

Morgan with the silver belt just like the one I was wearing.

Morgan.

Carlos gave me a sympathetic look that was probably for whatever issue he thought I had with Morgan, and not the one I actually did. “Yeah, I know. But hey, lots of empty bunks; you don’t have to pick one near him. Come on, grab your stuff; I’ll get you settled in while the tops are still pounding their chests at each other.”

I blinked and let him sweep me into a bunkerish room-- slightly better decorated than the one for the tops I’d seen over people’s heads as we shoved through the crowd.

There was one bed with an old knit blanket over the standard issue sheets; Carlos pulled me away from it. “That’s Morgan. I’m over here.” The bed with. The full comforter. With the pattern of roses. “You have to personalize. I swear, these walls are ensorceled to get boring within minutes.”

“You would keep company with Ramirez,” a voice growled. Morgan stalked into the room and threw his duffel on the knit blanket, taking his broadsword’s scabbard off of an over-the-shoulder sling and sliding it onto his council-issued belt with a jerk. “Though I’m surprised you’re deigning to share our space. Isn’t it beneath you, Dresden?”

Carlos shot me a questioning look, and I gritted my teeth. I was surprised the young Warden didn’t know; I guess I’d assumed it was a running joke around these parts.

“I used to go belted. I still go belted.”

“More than belted, you know I understand the necessity,” Morgan snapped, and some of the more... personal hostility was really starting to make sense. “He hates submissives.”

“Harry?” Carlos’s smooth brow furrowed up.

“I don’t. I hate--” Being one. Being treated like one.

“Internalized prejudice isn’t healthy. I mean, in the culture we live in, I can’t blame you--”

“Of course you can’t,” Morgan mocked.

“Oh, don’t you start your first wave BS with me. Not today.” Carlos snarled.

“You pretty little compromise of a sub,” Morgan growled. For once he was angry and not directly at me. I didn’t know what to do. “You think you can right our wrongs by asking sweetly; you dress the way you do; how do you expect to be treated? ”

“Like a fucking human being no matter what I wear.”

Okay, I was officially in the crossfire of an argument I didn’t understand.

“You play to them. You do as they like--”

“I don’t think it’s a shame to have sex, okay? And when I meet the top I want to spend the rest of my life with, I’m not going to be ashamed of having it, okay? Even Dworkin had sex with tops when she was writing, or is she too dangerously newfangled for you--”

“Don’t presume to lecture to me, you shackle-scarred harlot!”

“Oh, yeah. Submission shaming language. Way to go. Sub rights all the way.” Carlos turned his back forcefully, snorting angrily. “I’m sorry, Harry. I can’t deal with that guy sometimes.”

“I … have no idea what just happened. Who’s Dworkin?”

“...the sub rights writer? Wrote about the social inequality that makes even consensual relationships between tops and subs coercive? Got fired five times and sent to prison twice for refusing to take discipline at work? Everyone misquotes her about sex?”

Somehow I figured that asking ‘you mean the collar burning movement’ was going to get me in trouble. So I didn’t. I know. Historic. “Sorry. Must have missed that one. I think I heard something about it.”

“It’s okay,” Carlos smiled a little wearily. “I shouldn’t expect everyone to be up on the second wave movement, anyway. You’re definitely not the first one to give me a blank stare... Basically: Morgan’s old school sub-rights, but thinks he’s on the cutting edge by wanting more subs to wear belts and not dress up like... well, subs. And I’m in the camp that thinks that wearing jewelry in public doesn’t ‘set back the movement’, and that what I wear is nobody’s business but my chosen top, and if anyone has a problem with it, that’s their burden to carry.”

I stared at him, my face a mask of horror. The belt thing, the Morgan thing, they were bad enough. This was just weird and exactly counter to everything I’d accepted and hated about being a sub. This was-- the only word I could think of was treasonous.

“Oh, wow.” Carlos sighed and gave me a strained look. “Just. I’m sure you’re a nice guy. It’ll be okay. I’ve got some literature if you’re curious-- only if you’re curious. I’m not going to preach, I promise. I’m sure we can get along. Just try to go easy on the anti-sub language, please? It gets really old. And no subsexual cracks about Morgan-- I know he’s super butch but he can’t help that and it doesn’t mean anything about what he wants in bed. And it’s not like that should be an insult anyway, you know?”

“I’ve been read the riot act about that before,” I said uncomfortably. “A friend gave me a short version of her non-magical department’s sensitivity training.”

“Really? I like your friend.” He looked surprised. “Luccio hands down her own, although it’s more a ‘we’re all comrades in arms, who cares what your partner does in bed, go kill something now’.”

“Nice of her,” I muttered.

“Don’t-- don’t badmouth Luccio, okay? She’s been great to a lot of us,” Carlos said in a lower tone, glancing over his shoulder at Morgan. “Led a big charge around the turn of the century to stop the Council from turning away combat wizards because they were subs. Really progressive with equal drilling and discipline. And anyway, Morgan will flay you. She’s the only top he likes. Maybe because she used to be his mentor and she never tried to collar him, I don’t know.” He flicked another glance at the angry wizard who was unpacking his duffel as if it had offended him. “...I don’t know. He’s so angry. Man. I don’t know what he’d even do in bed, as much hate has he has for tops. Heh, not that I’m going to waste a lot of tears on their hurt feelings. Boo hoo, we beat subs for having brains and one of them doesn’t like us...” he broke off. “Sorry. Getting carried away again. Stop me before I get into the Culture of Public Property.”

“It’s okay.” I wasn’t sure if it was, because my brain couldn’t process half of what he was saying. I knew what all the words meant, they were just-- nonsense.

The tension eased up when a few more people made it into the barracks-- Lynn McGregor, a handsome, shortish combat wizard who could have pulled off a collar or a belt (but preferred her wife’s tasteful collar for civilian wear), and Mari Abel, an uncollared sensitive from Calgary whose opinion on the Carlos-Morgan sub rights debate war was ‘who the hell has time to split all those hairs? There’s a vampire war on. Suck it up.’ Two more from the Canadian territories were busy and hadn’t made it (one of those, I was half-told, half-warned, was a switch who leaned sub and didn’t feel comfortable sleeping with the tops).

There weren’t many of them. Of us. But half a dozen besides me was half a dozen more than I’d been expecting.

I got to know them over the coming weeks, awkwardly easing into being in a group, sharing a space. I didn’t want to. I’d heard a lot about how subs were naturally cooperative and passive and formed social organizations, and there was nothing I’d ever read about myself in a textbook that I wanted to see confirmed. It felt natural, and I minded that. And it wasn’t just the other subs; Luccio and the other senior wardens drilled us in mixed groups, teaching us to depend on each other. If anyone in the group of six I wound up in had issues with a sub being their shield man, they were fantastic at hiding it. There was a sense that there was no time to mind, that war was drawing down on us.

And it felt too good. I never trust too good. Fortunately, that didn’t last long-- but I’ll get to that. Anyway, at first it was weird. I guess Morgan, breathing down my neck and glaring at me over meals, actually helped: it added this familiar flavor of disdain to my life I wouldn’t know what to do without.

“You’re a lot like each other, I think,” Carlos said one evening, as he was painting his nails. He’d offered to paint mine and laughed sympathetically at the face I made. “I don’t know. I see him as super-traditional in bed, into restraints and mastery language like out of a fifties handbook on how to be a perfect sub-- yes master, please master-- but he’s so uncomfortable about owning it. Like other people I could name, right?”

“I’m not a damn thing like Morgan.”

“Sure you are. I bet you both give the same wicked stubble burn.” He winked at me, and something twisted in my stomach, a strange little flutter. I couldn’t pin it down at first, and when I did it didn’t help; the last time I’d felt that strange little tension was when Murphy had been showing me her vast collection of sub-on-sub magazines.

“Carlos,” I asked, the next evening in the showers. In hindsight, I could have picked a better place. “Are you-- have you ever wondered if you might be subsexual?”

He pulled away from me-- it wasn’t a big exaggerated movement, just a little tightening of his body language to close himself off and keep his limbs away from me. “No. No. One hundred percent interested in tops.” He swallowed, blinked tepid water from his long lashes. “There’s nothing wrong with it, though. If you-- If you know anyone who’s questioning.”

I wondered if he even noticed how tense he was around me for the next few days. I could tell he was trying, though; the books he left under my pillow were long and dry and talked about endocrine function and pleasure/pain response and the fairly new concept of a spectrum of sexual desires contrasted with the spectrum of sexual performance. It looked a lot like homework more than an olive branch, but I’d take it. ...some of the books had pictures, anyway.

I make it sound like it was nothing but a sub’s night out, complete with sweet drinks for our delicate palettes and movies about finding TopPerfect and having kids or pets or something, but all these weird philsophical discussions were just breaks in brutal training-- in the Laws and their attendant less head-choppy lower case laws, in sparring, in pairing off to teach each other methods of magic and face down against people who didn’t fight like us. I ran into kinetomancy I’d never even seen before and it made my combat magic stronger and more versatile trying to take down Choi’s damn turbulent-air magic dispelling shield just one more goddamn time.. and then again and again and again. We worked in teams and alone, tackling every new challenge Luccio could throw at us.

Carlos was right about the culture here, though. Luccio’s rules about sub equality were... well, even I thought they were kind of unreasonable, the way she demanded we be treated. Not being talked to like I was stupid was one thing, but ordering them not to talk down about subs in front of us-- it made me nervous. Like they were going to take it out on me. And some of them did, a pair who’d made nasty cracks about my looks and the way I needed to be strapped down and cleaned up until I looked my place. I made a few cracks of my own back.

One night they cornered me. They had manacles that crackled with energy, some kind of binding spell, and they were ready for me.

Panic makes me strong. I hit them with a Forzare that shattered their shields and threw them though a wall. Or two.

Afterwards I told Luccio I’d talked them into an unauthorized sparring match that had got out of hand, because I wanted it to be over. She disciplined me with a bruising leather flogger, viciously and efficiently, prefacing it with a quiet reminder that she did this as my superior officer and not as a top. The lashes stung but it wasn’t like I’d never gotten in trouble before.

And then she disciplined THEM and stars and stones what kind of rabbit hole had I fallen down? They got half the beating I did, because they were tops and because I’d copped to it being my fault, but apparently while every warden is an honorary top, some are more top than others. And they just-- they let her flog them. I’d never seen a top beaten before and I spent the next week terrified that the two of them were going to come get me when I was asleep and couldn’t fight them off-- wishing I’d let them just do whatever they’d been going to do and not made trouble. Wondering what kind of person that made me, hearing Morgan’s mocking voice in my head when I tried to sleep, and generally having a shitty shitty time.

And even after what I’d said to Carlos-- I’ll get to that in a second-- he and Morgan closed in around me, walking with me to the bathroom at night, eating with me, never letting me be in a hallway or the barracks alone. Lynn innocently got herself transferred into my six-team and somehow managed to always have eyes on me when I had to go up against one of the tops who’d tried to grab me. Mari put up some ‘practice’ lookout wards on the barracks door that alerted us when someone who didn’t sleep there came in.

I was a shithead. But I was one of them. And I wasn’t alone.

 

The thing with Carlos, I still feel bad about.

When I wasn’t being drilled into an exhausted pulp, or afraid for my life, or having my brain broken in five places, I still had to deal with being in a big group. Socializing didn’t come naturally even before the incident, and people seemed to be okay with that.. So I wound up staying in the barracks a lot, picking up Carlos’s stack of books despite my better judgement, and reading about abnormal sexual desires. And like I said. Pictures. Pulp novels I didn’t know had ever been written-- stuff I wouldn’t have been caught dead holding in the street. Images from underground movies I wouldn’t have owned even if I had a television.

The subsexual stuff still made my stomach tip and tighten, but somehow it was almost getting standard to me, because Murphy had been right-- a lot of tops like it, and tops are basically who pay for 70 percent of everything (or is it 60, these days? I know a lot of family-preservation groups throw a fit about how it’s changing) so gratuitous sub-on-sub was in a lot of places when you started to look. It wasn’t okay but somehow it was less not okay.

The top on top stuff, mostly bad copies of old book illustrations, was a little more shocking. Most of it was violent enough to trigger old memories of murder scenes, and I slammed the book, feeling sick. It was a while before I made myself go back to read that while hyperviolence was one fetish attached to supersexuality, it was a cultural perception more than a reality; the reality was more mundane, more consensual, like the few belt/belt couples I’d seen. And the statistics were kind of shocking; maybe as many as two percent of tops-- two of every hundred, and when you think of how many tops there are in Chicago-- were happier being almost primarily homosexual. (I also learned that the CPD was one of THE most liberal places you could be a sub in law enforcement, let alone not being normal sexually. I hadn’t realized how much of a stand Murphy was taking, standing behind the new sensitivity training, but somehow it didn’t surprise me.)

There was a hidden history of... not normal. ‘Best friends’ who never married. Records of proven subsexual pairings across continents and centuries, medical records from the 1800s where the clinical term was ‘misdirected’. So that’s where the insult ‘misfire’ came from... There were tragic current stories from five, ten years ago about couples where one top would submit to a collar just so that they could get a marriage license-- only to be separated, often imprisoned for fraud when the truth came out. Ditto for subsexual relationships where one put on a belt to try to keep it secret.

The records of corrective domination-- court ordered stints of discipline to ‘fix’ subsexuals or punish supersexuals into the ‘right’ behavior-- were as current as ‘02. And when a non-government top took that kind of repair work into their own hands, dealing out brutal sex to other tops or subs who weren’t in a relationship with them that would have gotten them thrown in prison otherwise, ‘misdirection panic’ was almost always a bulletproof defense in court. There were court cases up to ‘02, as well. They stopped there because that’s when the book had been published.

There were two states where corrective domination was still a mandatory sentence. Illinois wasn’t one of them. At least I wasn’t in one of the several other countries where the punishment was death or forced castration or lifelong confinement to a mental institution.

I read that and then I looked at some of the by-supersexual for-supersexual erotica and Murph was right. I did find it really sexy (I remembered her telling me ‘I like subs; why wouldn’t I like to see a bunch of them’ and filled in the appropriate blanks for myself). It would have been easy fantasy fuel if my brain wasn’t saturated with a thick mess of cool, hopeless depression about all the other shit. I hadn’t known this was here. I barely knew that anyone talked about being a sub like Carlos did, or even Morgan. I didn’t want to know.

“Multisexualism; homosexualism, and reclaiming ‘Misdirected’; Switches and multisexualism; Playing butch, playing dainty,” I quoted one evening to Carlos, reading chapter titles out of one of his books. “What’s the point of all this cute technical jargon when you’re just going to be treated like a freak and people are going to discipline you back into submission?” Why even try? Maybe life wasn’t fair but it had to be better than the government giving you to a strange top for the rest of your life so that they could ‘fix’ you, no checks applied, no questions asked.

“Because ‘freak’ is a label, Harry,” Carlos said, looking up from his paperback. “And you need words that mean things so you can unlabel yourselves. Like that sub-rights booklet I saw you leafing through, I know it had a big section about that. It’s part of the sub rights movement, all this non-standard sexuality stuff; we have to support their rights. Because they’re our rights, too.”

“...a lot of this stuff is really critical of straight tops.” I shook my head, changing the subject because that booklet had made me deeply uncomfortable. “You know, maybe if they were a little less assertive right out off the gate people wouldn’t think you were trying to attack them or try to challenge their authority.”

Carlos’ face darkened. “Yeah. You get back to me when ‘their defiance was a plea for help’ doesn’t fly as a court defense for brutalizing uncollared subs. Then I’ll try to feel really, really bad for the tops feeling challenged, okay?”

“I thought you didn’t hate them.”

“I like plenty of tops. They’re sexy. I want to sub for them. I don’t like a culture when even the ones I don’t like think I’m their property.”

“You said to smack you if you got into Public Property Culture again, Carlos. I’m considering it.”

From several beds away, Morgan-- who I’d thought was napping-- crashed the conversation.

“You would disagree on the one point he speaks the truth. Why don’t you rape him? Perhaps it will fix his foolish notion that he’s a creature of his own and you’ll get to feel like one of the tops you love so much.”

I cringed, wondering where the attack had come from, what I’d done to piss off Morgan THAT badly. “Don’t -- use that word.” It was a dirty word, one people only whispered, and using it as an accusation could get a sub into deep psychiatric care very fast. Everyone knew subs needed it. Using-- that word-- to describe normal punishment was a sign of deep mental disturbance.

Everyone knew that. Except apparently Morgan, who used it like a sword when he was angry.

“My _deepest_ apologies if I offended you, Dresden,” Morgan snarled, and rolled out of bed to go somewhere and make someone else miserable.

“Jeeze, that guy,” I sighed, turning back to Carlos-- and broke off in surprise. I’d thought we were having a pretty light theoretical discussion.

I didn’t think we were having the kind of discussion that could make him turn away from me, curled around his pillow, hands in fists.

“Carlos?”

He didn’t answer, and after a while I got up and left, feeling shitty.

 

Would you believe he was still my friend after that? He brushed off my apology with another strained smile and a ‘sorry, I take this stuff so personally sometimes’, but he stopped trying to talk about it with me. Morgan took up the cause for him, deciding that he was bad but I was worse. I was nearly beaten with a copy of ‘the Submissive Mystique’ one night. I read a lot. I didn’t talk about it.

I asked Carlos: “Have you had a lot of bad tops?”

He jerked his head to the side. “I haven’t had any, good or bad. I just-- I hate knowing that if I did, nobody would stop it. That I’d get punished for defending myself. It makes me afraid.”

I knew that old, sick fear. I’d always thought that not being comfortable with the idea--that a court or a boss could just discipline me, could take something that was supposed to be private between two people and use it against me-- made me a bad sub.

The idea that maybe it made the way things were wrong--

I couldn’t think like that. And I told Carlos so and it disappointed him, and things stayed awkward. I felt shitty; didn’t know how to fix it.

And he still looked out for me. They all did. Even Morgan.

 

I improved my time on a four mile run by twenty seconds. I did pushups until it hurt, slammed my will against unmoving stone until my head rang; I learned to fight, they built on everything Murphy had taught me in self defense and made it part of my instincts. They made me accept commands without thinking, and then they made me command, even if I couldn’t shake the fear that I would choke in the moment, that I didn’t have the natural authority.

I was a warden now, and even if it didn’t come naturally, it would be my job. I bellowed orders during drills until it felt no stranger shouting commands to fellow wardens than it than taking them did.

 

There was an openly supersexual top in the wardens. The way she wore a padlock on her belt sometimes made me uncomfortable-- it didn’t actually lock the belt, didn’t keep her from taking it off, but the symbology was clear; her partner, a baker back in Seattle, had the key. She held the key to the one on his belt.

All of Carlos’ protestations about how it wasn’t shameful didn’t mean anything to the tops who wouldn’t eat with her at lunch, or the ones who grabbed her wrists when Luccio and more liberal tops weren’t looking. Even the people who didn’t attack her for it never looked comfortable around her; they talked a lot about the subs they had and didn’t let her touch them.

I asked her why she wore the lock in so openly public.

“I don’t. I wear it here. It’s the only place I can, safely.”

I imagined what it must be like when this was ‘safely’ -- and then stopped imagining. I mumbled something and pointed her to Mac’s bar. Mac’s a top-- I mean, massively so, you can’t walk into his bar without knowing how much it is HIS bar-- but he’s violently sub rights and misfire rights. People saw it, I guess, as him exercising his dominance and they went with it, not the least because I mean ‘violently’ sub rights very literally. He protects the sanctity of his bar the way other tops protect their subs, and a lot of people respect him for that-- respect him for how well he does it, and how strong he is, I mean. Not respect him for his opinion. He’d put up a new plaque recently, and if I hadn’t read Carlos’ stuff I never would have known what it meant. And Chicago-- we had people there. They were open. I told her so and I saw a yearning in her eyes that she stepped on almost immediately. Like hope hurt.

I didn’t tell her I knew how she felt, because I didn’t really think I had the right.

Thinking about Mac made me homesick; I spent that night wishing I could go into the bar and crawl into a bottle. Mac’s politics might make me uncomfortable but I liked the way he stood up for them, too, in a guilty dirty kind of way. Only Mac that I know of has a metaphorical belt (he doesn’t wear a real one, I’ve never asked him why) big enough to stand up-- just because he thought it was the right thing to do-- to the quiet harassment that sub rights orgs get from unscrupulous people in zoning commissions and inspectors and city hall. Let alone sQSA or whatever the name was. I’d-- well, if Mac wasn’t married to his bar. And I was a better sub, could stand being a sub. And-- you know what, nevermind. Leave it at this: the bar made me feel safe; it was part of my city, not... part of this organization. Not the Wardens. Not the Council. I missed Chicago

Sub gets homesick. News at eleven, after this breaking newsflash about the startling blue color of the sky.

 

I apologized to Carlos again, a few nights before training was due to end; I’d already packed, itching to get home to what I understood, to go to the Carpenter’s for dinner and soak up normal, even if it hurt sometimes to see how happy Michael was with Charity’s collar, the peace I couldn’t ever find for myself, it reminded me what I wanted, what I was supposed to want.

“Why don’t you let it go, Harry?” Carlos asked, looking tired.

“Because everyone here treats you and Morgan like a joke for trying to talk about this stuff and it hurts you.” I went for a deflection that felt tasteless and crude the second it was out of my mouth. “And you’re too pretty to have your feelings hurt.”

“You’re such an asshole, Harry,” he said, and meant it, but he squeezed my shoulder. “Looking forward to going home?”

“Yeah. I miss Chicago.” I’d miss parts of training, too, and talking to Carlos even if he left me off kilter. My brain inserted something from the bottom of my guts into the next words because if I didn’t tell him who could I tell, and instead of talking about getting a beer I was whispering “I like tops, but-” before I could break it off.

Carlos’ eyes flicked around sharply, trying to make sure nobody else had heard. “I figured,” he said quietly. “When you asked. Morgan thinks-- Morgan thinks you just want to be a third wheel to impress tops. But I thought. Maybe. You were.”

I felt my face going stiff and my ears burning; I moved to get up and he said as loud as he could risk it, “I think you’re very brave.”

“I’m not brave, I’m fucked _up_ and I wish I wasn’t,” I said, and went to waste the water from the cistern on the roof in a long, long shower.

Carlos was sitting on my bed when I came back. He hugged me, awkwardly, stiffly, but he was trying. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he whispered. “You’re okay.”

I don’t think even he believed it all the way, but I guess it was nice to hear.

 

And then finally I was home-- away from the strange grind of bootcamp and back to actual mortal life where magic wasn’t everywhere and most people couldn’t spell ‘thaumaturgy’ if they tried. I fed my cat. I had a beer with Murphy, at Mac’s, eyeing the plaque now that I knew what it stood for. I ate with the Carpenters and admired their kids and worried about Molly’s temper and Charity saw something in my face that made her kinder to me than she’d ever been.

Turning down her quiet invitation to be her and Michael’s third for the night was like ripping off a limb, but it was the right thing to do. I loved Michael too much to make his bedroom my psychiatrist’s office and I would have felt worse than I already did about being with him when I didn’t even know myself yet if it would be about being with him for Charity's pleasure or if it would be for me-- it would have been bad.

 

I bought groceries. I solved cases and banished monsters. I wore the warden’s belt like a shield, because it was one belt I almost felt like I had a right to, because hours and hours of drilling and being part of a unit, part of a military force couldn’t change who I was and what I wanted but it made me strong and it made me competent, goddammit, and if Carlos Ramirez could be a regional commander I could be a Warden-- and I still spent a lot of time afraid.

After a while I got tired of being afraid. I’ve always handled fear badly. I bought some pink roses, and I went to talk to John Marcone, and I took him to bed.

I’d gone into it with a part of me not wanting to like it. I’d expected not to like it. I’d never really been into topping, not even for Susan-- an old lover, one of the kindest I’ve had--, who’d been a switch and known how to help me through it. And it wasn’t easy when John and I started; once we actually got into bed it was tense and wrong. But when I stopped trying to top him-- when it was just us, pleasing each other, serving each other breath for breath-- when I gripped him hard enough to bruise and it scared me and turned me off and he KNEW it did so he saved me, reassured me with nails that cut cruel lines down my back and stimulated every part of me that doesn’t read pain as a bad thing, when he pulled me back into the moment--when I swallowed his cock and thrust helplessly into his mouth at the same time and that made it better than okay and different than any time a top had made me do this, a different kind of perfect--

A piece of me fell into place. Something good and right and happy. And terrifying and going to make the rest of my life just that much harder; that’s how it goes.

“I can protect you,” John whispered, after, cradled in my arms but stroking my hair possessively, soothingly. “Let me protect you, Harry; tell me I can. Please. I can cheat the system, I can make it safe for you, no-one will hurt you again-”

“No,” I said. “These are the rules. No cheating. No promises. My bed, my money, my risk.” I thought about wearing his collar, pretending that he was my top, and how believable we would be and the respect it would get me and the way even the government would treat me in his name and how everything I’d ever seen since I was a kid told me that it was what I wanted-  
-And how much it would hurt the people who loved me seeing me in a pretty collar that his kind of crime had paid for. How much it would hurt me, down under the skin, and what a bitter, corrosive lie it would be for both of us. “I’m sorry,” I said, softly.

“You stubborn shit. You’re the worst kind of top and you don’t even fit a belt,” he said, shoving his face against my shoulder, hiding his anger against my skin. “I could lose you. I need you. Chicago needs you. Why won’t you let me make this easy?”

“Because it’s not easy for us.”

I tipped his face up and he met my gaze because he could. I looked into his face and read the same hurt that had kept me in a belt for most of my adult life; he’d been fighting the same fight, just dirtier than I had. “I’ll protect you as much as I can,” I said. “And … I guess you can protect me that much, back.”

“It will do,” he said, with a sigh. He kept my gaze. “I’m going to change Chicago, Harry. And then the world.”

“...and I’m going to change it the right way and not let you get away with using the wrong means for the right ends,” I said immediately.

He shook his head, eyes green and vibrant. “Oh Harry. You’re the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, do you know that? You’re so immature, shortsighted, quixotic, your virtue outdated by centuries-- why do you make me wish so badly that I could risk even a piercing? You wedge your idiocy into my heart, why shouldn’t your metal be in my skin? Why can’t I tell everyone that you’re the idiot that owns me in ways that nobody else can?”

“Because life sucks,” I said, only a little unsympathetically. “But this doesn’t have to.”

“It doesn’t,” he assured me, and hid his face in my neck again, in what I was recognizing as his well-concealed need not to be always in charge-- he nipped my skin to remind me that I wasn’t in charge, either. And it didn’t suck, not at all.


End file.
